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Currently, I am a Fellow for the Entrepreneurship for Good Program (Future of Audio Entertainment Challenge) at The DO School. I am a media professional, social entrepreneur and storyteller who experiments with media and art to document life, and I have worked with nonprofits, governments and campaigns internationally. I have an M.Sc. in Social & Cultural Anthropology from the London School of Economics & Political Science.
In this episode of Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations, Oprah sits down with Charles Eisenstein, philosopher, teacher and writer, to discuss the current atmosphere of “polarized oppositional, hate-based politics” in the U.S.A and other parts of the world and what this means for humanity and our evolution.
Eisenstein believes all sides are suffering from the same wound and that is one of separation, as he references Martin Luther King: "You can use hatred as a weapon, but you cannot use hatred to defeat hate." Witnessing the rising levels of hate in terms of violence, racism, blaming and division, it seems that the collective is subscribing to a narrative of fear. We are seeking some external evil force to justify our "war mentality" or resort to "fighting the bad guy” which will somehow solve our problems.
However, the truth is that we are the problem. Despite our advancements, we know more of celebrity lives than of those living in our communities. As Oprah and Eisenstein point out, the question we should be asking “the Other” is “what is it like to be you?” Only then can we begin to change an old paradigm, shed our conditioning and unravel the “grief” that arises from seeing ourselves as separate. As Eisenstein clarifies:
Yeah, if you’re not a separate self. Then what are you? You’re maybe the mirror of all things or you are the totality of your relationships. So that means that anything that happens, to anything, to any being is happening to you on some level. It means that any difficult relationship you have is mirroring something in yourself. It means that everything you do to the world will somehow come back to you. It means that the world outside ourselves is not just a bunch of stuff, but it’s a mirror of self.
In essence, it is not just about understanding we are all one—it is about asking is this how we wish to feel, how we choose to expend energy and how we want to live?
Source: Oprah Winfrey with Charles Eisenstein Image: Oprah's SuperSoul... listennotes.com